Is Hannah Arendt's political thought relevant to the contemporary planetary situation? This article draws on The Human Condition and some of Arendt's ancient and modern sources to answer this question, using a phenomenological distinction between outdoors and indoors to make sense of three likely types of artificial adaptation to a warming planet. Arendt's account of the importance of the “body-bound senses” of an “earth-bound creature” need not result in the problematic fetishization of immediate rather than mediated knowledge, or of an “earthly nature” supposedly prior to and independent of the human artifice, but can draw attention to the narrowing of human beings’ “angle of receptivity” to a surprising and unpredictable reality. This perspective, however, also discloses the limits of Arendt's work in the face of ecological transformations that are simultaneously planetary in scale and highly unequal in their consequences.

Hannah Arendt's essay on Bertolt Brecht has often been understood as an indictment of Brecht's postwar accommodation with the Stalinist regime in East Germany, in line with Arendt's supposed commitment to a firm separation between poetry and politics. Offering the first full reconstruction of the transnational history of Arendt's writing on Brecht, this article shows instead that Arendt's essay was a defense of Brecht against the polemics it is often taken to exemplify. Joining poetry to politics by holding both at a distance from philosophy, Arendt assigned poetry the vocation of disruptive faithfulness to factual reality, which allowed her to praise Brecht on political grounds and to leverage forbearance for his political “sins.” Indeed, by narrating Brecht's “sins” and “punishment” against the grain of Cold War discourse about the poet, Arendt's essay emulated aspects of the poetic practice she admired in Brecht's writing.

Iris' written work has been very widely admired; she has obviously helped shape the field of democratic political theory; she has deeply influenced students. The discussion of this work will go on in books and articles until her ideas have been fully absorbed. Here I will say a little about my particular experience of her collegiality. I was Iris' junior colleague at Chicago for six years. I met Iris eight years ago this week, under a portico outside a large hotel like the one in which you are all gathered, not too long after I had first read Democracy and Difference and shortly before my first APSA paper presentation on, as it happened, deliberative democracy. I had no way of knowing then how directly and deeply she would affect my intellectual life. She was already for me a standard, even before I met her. But how that fact deepened over time is what I want to render here.

This article presents a novel critical account of a key concept in democratic theory, “rule,” via an unorthodox interpretation of Hannah Arendt's work. Many theorists treat democracy as one type of regime; others, stressing the importance of unruliness to democratic politics, challenge the reduction of democracy to a form of rule. Although this debate remains caught within conventional oppositions between order, closure, and continuity; and interruption, openness, and novelty, Arendt shows this whole matrix of oppositions to be an artifact of the dominance of a hierarchical understanding of rule. Her unusual critique of rule and her distinctive account of the meaning of “beginning” draw attention to an important dimension of political activity that lies off these axes of opposition, shedding new light on democratic agency and the forces that obstruct it.